Tag: Jake Ellenberger

Travis Browne, Antonio Silva, Jay Hieron, and all of the players in tomorrow night’s UFC on FX: Browne vs. Bigfoot card are set to hit the scales tonight from the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The event will be broadcast live starting at 5 p.m. EST, and wouldn’t you know it, we happen to have TOTALLY EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE of the weigh-ins right here!

OK, so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but we will be covering all the action, so make sure to swing by at 5 p.m. today for the staredowns and 8 p.m. tomorrow for all our liveblog coverage of UFC on FX 5.

Keeping in line with last weekend’s UFC on FUEL 5 event, the UFC is casually dropping off another heavyweight sure-to-be-slugfest in our laps with this Friday’s UFC on FX: Browne vs. Bigfoot card, which, while not as stacked as the Nottingham affair, does provide plenty of reasons to tune in to a channel that half the country actually has. Plus, it goes down in the state who once had the balls to elect this man Governor, so even if the fights somehow end up sucking, there’s a good chance that the crowd will make up for it in the stands. Opal’s Glamorama, motherfuckers!

Yeah, we know it sounds cheesy, but there is simply no better way to describe the likelihood of extreme violence that Friday’s main event will bring. Antonio Silva has served little more purpose than a 265-pound punching back in his last two performances, dropping brutal losses to Daniel Cormier and Cain Velasquez under the Strikeforce and UFC banners. We’re not sure how a chin straight out of Tango and Cash is somehow being questioned, but needless to say, “Bigfoot” is probably going to be looking to utilize his BJJ background and devastating ground and pound to secure a victory against an undefeated KO artist like “Hapa.” The question is, will he be able to take it to the ground? Browne is no slouch on the mat, and has picked up nine of his thirteen victories in the first round, including five in the first minute(!!!!), so Silva better look for the takedown early if he values life on the outside of Dr. Moreau’s island.

Last month, Jay Hieron (23-5 MMA, 0-2 UFC) was days away from making his return to the UFC for the first time in seven years when the proverbial rug was pulled out from under him. The now infamous series of events that resulted in the cancelation of UFC 151 left Heiron and others out in the cold as he was prepared to face Jake Ellenberger in a welterweight showdown that marked his first fight in the Octagon since 2005. But while many of the fighters on the 151 card panicked and wondered when and if they’d get the opportunity to fight again, Hieron took it in stride, patiently waited, and was rescheduled to face Ellenberger at UFC on FX 5: Browne vs. Bigfoot this Friday, October 5.

The Las Vegas-based fighter has been in this situation before. He was supposed to fight on the Affliction: Trilogy card in 2009 that ended up being canned, and a Strikeforce welterweight title shot against Nick Diaz later that year was shuttered after Diaz failed to get licensed by the California State Athletic Commission. It’s like Hieron walked under a ladder and broke a mirror while a black cat crossed his path.

“People were saying that I am cursed,” the Xtreme Couture fighter says with a hearty laugh. “At the end of the day, if there isn’t a twist on it for me then something isn’t right. I’ve learned to embrace all these things that surround the fight game. I’m never surprised.”

So, seriously, what’s a few more weeks when you’ve waited seven long years since your last UFC fight?

For an event that was to be headlined by two of the sports all-time greats, and a supporting cast that was pretty much garbage-ass, it’s disappointing that tonight you have no PPV to watch, no excuse to spend even more time at Hooters, and no good reason not to attend the wedding your girlfriend has been nagging you about going to. But if you thought that was going to stop us from milking this thing for everything its got, you are severely wrong, my friend.

Taking the reigns tonight is longtime CagePotato contributor/Twitter pseudo celebrity Jason Moles. This card will either be a smashing success thanks to the main event or a failure of epic proportions thanks to everything else. Stick around, insult him in the comments section, and be sure to tell all of your friends about the only UFC 151 liveblog on the internet (EVER!) can be found. Now let’s get to it.

Pictured: Their approximate reactions to finding out “garbage-ass” was a real phrase.

One week ago, Ben published an article voicing concerns over how weak UFC 151′s main card was. But it was cool, because Jon Jones vs. Dan Henderson was going to be such an awesome fight. Two days ago, Jones vs. Henderson was scrapped and UFC 151 was canceled. [Ed. note: Damn, two days? Feels like we've been covering this forever.] Even though most of us acknowledged that the cancellation of the event was at least partially due to the garbage-assness of pretty much the entire card, we were too busy talking about Jon Jones ducking Chael Sonnen/Sonnen attempting to troll his way into an immediate title shot (depending on which side of the fence you’re on) to really delve into the issue. But now that the UFC has started to transplant the canceled UFC 151 fights to other cards, it’s time to take a closer look at that issue for a moment.

The bouts from UFC 151 are quickly being rescheduled for different cards, with UFC on FX 5 taking a significant chunk of them. As we covered in yesterday’s link dump, UFC 151′s planned co-main event, Jake Ellenberger vs. Jay Hieron, will now be the co-main event of UFC On FX 5. This won’t be the only fight from UFC 151′s main card that will now be padding UFC on FX 5 – Dennis Hallman vs. Thiago Tavares, Danny Castillo vs. Michael Johnson and Shane Roller vs. Jacob Volkmann will be moved to this card as well. UFC on Fuel TV 6 will now be featuring fights between bantamweights Takeya Mizugaki and Jeff Hougland and flyweights John Lineker and Yasuhiro Urushitani, while Kyle Noke and Charlie Brenneman will do the man dance on the undercard of UFC 152.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s worth mentioning that absolutely none of these fights – three of which were on the pay-per-view portion of UFC 151, mind you – have made it to the main card of an upcoming pay-per-view. Now I understand that financially, most fighters who were expecting a paycheck on September 1 simply can’t afford to wait until November’s UFC 154 to fight again. But that’s not the issue: The issue is that the UFC could afford to move pay-per-view quality fights *makes this hand gesture* to free television in the first place.

If you are at all familiar with how Wordpress (the program that powers this site) works, then you know that there is a seemingly limitless number of categories and options to select when drafting up a given post. One of them, titled “Post Type”, provides several pre-selected categories for us to choose from when determining the content and article type of said post. However, when I attempted to select “Injury” for the umpteenth time this morning, Wordpress would simply not allow it. “I’m sorry, Jared, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” it uttered (yes, our Wordpress is self-aware). And before I knew it, my computer sprouted legs, shoved me aside, and walked out of my life forever.

What I’m getting at is, the injury curse of summer 2012 has gotten so frustrating that it is even beginning to affect the non-emotive machines, forcing me to relocate from my two bedroom brownstone to the dismal public library at which I now reside. The floor smells like piss here, and I’m pretty sure a homeless man is masturbating at a computer not ten feet away from me. Either that, or he is a big UFC fan who also just learned that Josh Koscheck has been forced to withdraw from his UFC 151 co-main event matchup with “Jake Ingleburger”, and is taking his disappointment out on his junk. In either case, this is getting hard to watch.

(Who knew that “The Dream” was actually short for “The Wet Dream Brought on by Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation”?)

After going 2-2 in his return to the welterweight division, which began back in 2010 and included wins over Paulo Thiago and Martin Kampmann, as well as a most recent loss to Jake Ellenberger at the inaugural UFC on FUEL event, it looks like Diego Sanchez is headed back down to lightweight. We have been told by an anonymous source that the move has nothing to do with the fact that B.J. Penn a.k.a the man who handed Sanchez the worst beating of his career has returned to the welterweight division, but rather because BJ Penn a.k.a the man who handed Sanchez the worst beating of his career has left the lightweight division. So rest assured, Sanchez is definitely not ducking B.J. Penn.

Sanchez made the announcement over his Twitter account earlier today in a conversation with UFC color commentator Joe Rogan:

@joerogan there isn’t anyone out there that understands Mma as a whole like you do! Thanks Joe, its back to 155 for me… Should be good!!